Lifting Restrictions

Well, my state just joined a number of others and announced that as of May 31, all COVID related restrictions on capacity, office closures, etc. would be lifted. And mask mandates will be lifted once 70% of adults are fully vaccinated. (This is obviously an incentive for people to get vaccinated, but at this point the people who want the vaccine have probably gotten it; and the people who don't want it, or don't want to wear masks, have already not been wearing masks.)

I hate reading the comments on the governor's posts because they're mostly angry people saying how he's a tyrant and they're going to vote him out of office, but on this announcement there were even a lot of people saying they felt like this was too soon and a mistake to loosen restrictions to this extent. According to Covid Act Now, ours is still one of a handful of states in the "very high risk" category.

New York Daily News

Experts are also now saying it's unlikely that the US will reach herd immunity through infections and vaccines, primarily due to the variants that have developed - and once again, the more people continue to get infected, the more chances there are for different variants to emerge. "Early on, the target herd immunity threshold was estimated to be about 60 to 70 percent of the population. ... But as vaccines were developed and distribution ramped up through the winter and into the spring, estimates of the threshold began to rise. That is because the initial calculations were based on the contagiousness of the original version of the virus. ... As a result, experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80 percent. If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunized people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again."